This is a slightly edited transcript from a presentation by Nathaniel Williams on “Contemplative Life and M.C. Richards’ Art” that took place on September 21, 2020, at Lightforms Art Center in Hudson, New York.
It's so nice that you came out tonight to sit in a gallery with a mask on, six feet from everyone else. I appreciate your enthusiasm. You must have had a nice light meal before coming because this presentation is at six o'clock. I also was going to make it nice and light, I hope, to accompany a salad or some yogurt.
I have been working for the last two years with some colleagues to launch a program, there are some members of the cohort here tonight, named after Mary Caroline Richards. This visiting exhibition came out of an organic connection to one of the stewards of Mary Caroline Richards' works, that heard about the program.
It's been a journey coming to this point. I remember when we were planning to mount this art and share it, and to have events surrounded by Mary Caroline Richards' art. We had more ideas than what we've ended up realizing. About 10 days ago we had a group of people here who were close with Mary Caroline Richards, who were students of hers, or had lived with her. We spent an evening hearing stories about knowing, learning and living with Mary Caroline Richards.
A week from tonight, there will be a panel with Sara Parrilli, who's a Waldorf teacher, from the nearby Hawthorne Valley Waldorf school, and a professor of education from the University of Albany, named Heinz-Dieter Meyer, discussing one of Mary Caroline Richards' many essays on education.
We also wanted to talk about Mary Caroline Richards' connection to contemplative culture and spirituality. That's what this evening is dedicated to. It is somewhat brief just because of the nature of speaking about Mary Caroline Richards' artwork. It is very intimidating because, as you can see just from these paintings, or if you've taken a moment to look at her ceramic work, there's a lot going on. When you read her writing, it's especially full of creative energy, movement and inspiration. It's not something you really want to say much about, but rather to be present for. At the same time, here we are in Lightforms Art Center, which has graciously agreed to host this exhibit, and all the events we've been planning. This is a center for art and spirit, and so the attempt will be made!
Art and spirit is in one way the crucial question of her practice and work. I hope to at least characterize some perspectives that will allow you to feel this. That's what I plan to do tonight. I will move between a few different things. I will speak about the art that we have surrounding us. I also selected a group of passages from her most famous book, which is called, Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person.[1] This was published in the '60s and was hugely popular. If you haven't read it, it's really a work of literature. I'm surprised I got my first copy eight years ago considering I've been interested in art my whole life. This is a really significant individuality that I hadn't really heard about. I will also share some anecdotes from the first month of the M.C. Richards' program and speak a little bit about M.C. Richards’ place in the last 150 years of art.
This kind of disparate connecting of the things, of her text, her work, and stories from the last weeks, feels in harmony with a characteristic feature of her spirit and her life. Centering, which is, interestingly enough, about pottery, poetry, and the person. If you read it, pottery emerges as a metaphor for the whole universe. It's not a book about pottery, where you simply learn techniques. Such might make one a decent potter from a technical perspective, but Centering, which is the title of the book, becomes this grand imagination for bringing things together, including things you don't want to bring together. All the things that you're ashamed of, or dualisms that you can't reconcile, or the mundane, that may seem utterly meaningless.
Richards writes:
"It is this centering which potter performs with clay, poet with music and imagery, person with conscience and consciousness. Forms are given by the mutual yielding of elements to one another. Transformations in pottery, poetry, and the person come about in experiences which center the dualisms, the flying parts, the stragglers. The crisis comes when elements will not yield. The crisis is to center our obstinacies."[2]
There is such a spirit of affirmation in Mary Caroline Richards, and you can sense here she is writing about this experience of centering dualisms, flying parts, the stragglers, the crisis, to center our obstinacies. The book contains very personal anecdotal, autobiographical stories of the most hellish times in her life, leading to her 40th year, which she describes as a new birth.
Inspired by this spirit, I'm going to take some, what may seem disconnected things, and try to weave them together tonight, always coming back to her book.
There's a conventional view on artwork that many of us will have as a go-to attitude for artwork. We may not always think about art like this, or only think about art like this: As a nice thing. A thing that has been created by a craftsperson, someone with imagination and skill and, perhaps, genius. It's a rare object often. It's actually an object that has all of these qualities. A self-contained, beautiful thing. It's a conventional orientation in Europe and America, and many other parts of the world. It hasn't always been this way with artwork. In the last 100 years, you can say there's been a tendency for art to try to get away from that state of being.
There's one artist who's doing these kinds of things all the time. He's always in the newspapers. He's a street artist. He is called Banksy. You may have heard of him. He's an English graffiti artist, in essence. He often works with stencils. The public does not know who he is. He's kept his identity secret. He's literally one of the most famous artists as far as name recognition is concerned, but who is he?
I remember there was a work of his art in a gallery with a bulky frame. It was on auction, a place where art sells for millions of dollars. They're auctioning off an original Banksy. The bidding is going up, going up, over a million dollars for this original Banksy, and finally: sold! The hammer comes down, and the picture starts moving in the frame. There's a shredder built into the frame, and it's just shredded. The buyer kept the artwork, saying, "Well, now I'm a part of art history."
Another project went in the opposite direction. At one point, as many as 15 years ago, he had a fellowship of sorts to create art in New York City. He's what is typically called a vandal. No one knows who he is, but somehow he got this support to do this. He is set loose in New York City to create art, which means largely putting graffiti on New York's walls.
One of the things that he did is that he set up a table outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an old man who was selling Banksy canvases. Now, I don't know if you've ever been in front of the Met. There are often artists selling their work. Well, here were some Banksy originals for 50 bucks. A whole bunch of them. He made the announcement the next day that this had been his original artwork. Someone had even haggled the seller down a little bit. They ended up with a very valuable work of art.
This inspires the question; "Why the hell is this object valued differently here, verses over here?" Why is it valuable in Sotheby's, but on the streets of New York, it's not valued? What's going on here?" He seems to be focused on the forces at work in the art market, and the fetishism of artwork. It makes you question artwork as something very special, just for artists and for creative people, not for all of us, as a real problem in society. You can think back to 1913, to Marcel Duchamp, a French artist, he took a urinal and he laid it on its back, and he submitted it for a show, titled, Fountain. He signed it R. Mutt with the statement, "I've long appreciated the sculptural forms of my work, and I think it's time to exhibit them in that spirit."
It's literally a urinal, just turned on its back, lying on a pedestal. What makes art Art? If it's in a certain setting, is it then art? For instance, the artwork of Banksy, it wasn't just the object, right? It was the whole system. Every auctioneer was part of his artwork. It's not just an object for him. It's a larger social, philosophical question that he's working with. That's the artwork. It’s not just crafting a painting or a picture.
Now let’s turn to Mary Caroline Richards. She was literally in the room, participating in some of the most radical innovations in the American art movement of the second half of the last century. She was close friends with John Cage, who some of you may know. She loved Gertrude Stein, the poet, and was herself a wonderful poet. When you read her poetry, at first, if you're used to certain forms of poetry, it might seem a little dazzling and confusing. Just like her paintings.
She says in this book, for instance, "Anything can be poetry." I believe her to be sincere. When you read her and you spend time with her work, it's not hard to sense that she had such pleasure in simple sounds, in simple pictures because there was so much going on for those who can muster the energy to engage. She would delight in sounds, for instance, for instance, for instance, for instance, for instance, for instance, for instance, we can repeat common words until they turn into powers we might feel in falling leaves, or crumpled paper, or blooming daffodils, or something else.
For instance, for instance, for instance, anything can be poetry, anything can, anything can, anything can, anything can, anything can, anything can, anything can, anything can, anything can, anything can. Does art come alive? Is something happening in there?
"I have lived my life close to certain impulses in contemporary art. The music of the single sound, the composition of silence, the proliferating galaxies. The poetics of Western Imagism. No ideas, but in things. Garbage art, sculpture out of mashed automobiles, paintings out of old Coke bottles, soiled shirts, window blinds, coat hangers, paintings made out of dirt, meant to look like dirt, to consecrate the dirt, an art which consecrates the discard. Cellar doors, walls, sidewalks, street surfaces. As well as all the minutiae of nature. A choreography of making breakfast. Summoning attention, drawing the gaze in, into. And into the wonder comes a kind of high mirth. A release of joy in the form."[3] And here, there is a subtle differentiation. Maybe it's not so subtle. We can compare it to the Dada movement. They'd use train tickets and curse words and trash to make pictures. They'd use nonsense to make poetry. A big part of their work was to show that capitalism makes special things out of nothing, and then sells them for really high prices, perpetuating class distinctions. It was more often than not a political commentary. Now, Mary Caroline Richards, she was interested in this. She was a reader of Lukacs, one of the erudite Marxists of the literary period in the last century. But there's another direction that she goes, "I feel there is another step, and yet another. This eye that opens upon the rejected, may be unopened to other vision." This is where she took this development.
She adopted the task of trying to make herself energetic, passionate and malleable enough that she could bear the reality of the world, also in its creative, tangible presence. This became her whole life practice. We can look at this in her relationship to painting. These works around us are late creations of Mary Caroline Richards. She was mostly active as a poet and ceramicist, but she does write about painting briefly in Centering.
"Art creates a bridge between being and embodiment. What are pigments and gestures, the ephemera of painting? Surely, when we look at a painting, we are not seeing the paint merely. We are seeing something that is not there visibly, but which enters our perception through the eye. Paintings fade, peel, dirty, tear, rot. Pots break. Art in its material aspects is as impermanent as breath. But meanwhile, what has been its task? To perpetuate the supersensory awareness of humankind."[4]
This is where there's a real difference with Mary Caroline Richards' celebration of, for instance, crude painting. We can look at these as crude paintings. It can appear she has no technique. You may think a child could do this, and you may think this in a negative, pejorative spirit. That's another point to consider, but when she turns towards sound, poetry, color, what happens? Just yellow, for instance, if you look at this yellow, this particular yellow in this painting, it's almost unbearably, vivaciously active, but not in a way that is aggressive, necessarily, but one that's enlivening.
Looking at this particular yellow I feel, around my shoulder blades, around my head, I can sense all kinds of activity in this yellow. There's this quickness to it. I would never call this yellow slow. There are movements in there that are fast. Also, there is a certain direction, or focus. What is all that? What's all that terrain? All of this, that's where Mary Caroline Richards was living. How did she interpret it? What were those experiences for her?
Now to diverge briefly to our recent coursework. We have been drawing, the first four weeks in the program, down the road, about 10 miles from here. It was a course on visual studies and place in history. The first week, we actually spent learning how to look in such a way that we can start to see things as two-dimensional surfaces. One way to do this is by working with charcoal and newsprint. It's amazing what this translation of things into two-dimensional surfaces makes accessible.
Parallel to our work, we looked at some of the people who have described their experiences in this direction. For instance, Cezanne, the landscape painter. He worked in two-dimensional patches in order to render landscapes and visions of towns. He wasn't a philosopher type. He didn't write any books, though he wrote letters. He wasn't very social. He didn't give lectures or presentations, but he would write, in his letters, comments like, "I've become the consciousness of the landscape. The landscape thinks itself in me." What does it mean to take that seriously, as an experience of an artist painting outside, what does it mean? What kind of crazy vitality are we talking about that Cezanne had access to?
We read how Merleau-Ponty, a phenomenologist, described it in one of his essays. We also read a lecture by Rudolf Steiner, where he talks about Cezanne. Steiner was a significant source of growth and learning for Mary Caroline Richards. He would say these enigmatic things like, "Through destroying the third dimension in visual art, you open up the dimension of the spirit." That may sound enigmatic, but look how all of these pictures are flat and unclear, as far as representation is concerned. There is not much of an attempt to represent anything that would be a spatial object.
What's she doing? All of these intangible, subtle experiences are happening. She was so clear that this kind of experience was, for her, a widening of perception, to the point where she was beginning to perceive the spiritual in things that usually just appeared to her as material, or as mundane, as insignificant. She felt this to be, in part, an overcoming of her cultural conditioning.
"Fine discrimination requires a discipline of non-discrimination, of affirmation. Awareness of the world must precede its registration. I find it so timely now, the invasion of the West by Oriental philosophy."[5] Here, she's talking about Europe and the United States as the West and comparing it to the spiritual teaching then coming from Asia, "which stresses non-attachment and other modes of being by which systems of evaluation may be transcended. Western man needs help in using his organism's unconscious flow. He seems to have developed a differentiated consciousness at the expense of fertilizing contact with the ground of being. He needs to let go of the intellectualism, which tends to be the spirit of our art and theology, as well as our research."
Even more bluntly, she writes, "Different bodies of energy live within every person. Motives, for example, are as substantial as muscles. They'll form the different elements, and may indeed act within them. These bodies lie within each other, through each other, like transparencies, like currents of form suggested in certain paintings and photographs by movements of water and air. The man who sees clearly, can see through, the clairvoyant. The fact that I want to stress here is that one's inner life, one's spirit is as specific, as palpable in material, as the shape of one's hair."[6]
This is an attempt at orienting ourselves towards the contemplative dimensions in Mary Caroline Richards' art. Mary Caroline describes entering into these experiences, into these creative processes, and there are these intangible movements, creative things that she met. They also appeared when she observed people. For instance, she looked to the spiritual constitution of people, or practiced seeing the spiritual constitution of people with the same sensitivities that she developed in her artistic sensibility, to the point where she says, What I'm trying to say is that your I am is as material and specific as your hair.
She had a truly spiritual view of the world, and of art. This is something that, when you look back at her place in the history of art, makes her stand out. She had this unbelievable clarity of the spiritual dimension of being, that makes things what they are. She was intensively working to be worthy to experience and engage with this variety of experience. It was her life.
Entering an exhibition like this, with the historical narrative of how she participated and contributed to watershed innovations in art seventy five years ago, one might sense she exists in that space, in the past, that her significance is somehow back there. This is misleading. She felt her work in much larger trajectories. She writes about quantum physics reaching a point where it was no longer possible to see material objects that were being theorized about. Instead, they were made up of mathematical theory itself. They were ideas. I had the possibility to meet a physicist named Arthur Science and discuss this once. He had one of the laboratories at Amherst College, where they performed some of the quantum experiments that are used to demonstrate these theories. He largely said the same thing. That was probably eight years ago. She felt like this was the beginning of a giant paradigm shift.
Now I'd like to introduce a term that's so widely maligned, but I'd like to introduce it in this spirit, also connected to the new physics. She writes, "It seems that a new age is seeking birth. Much in the new birth will be rebirth of ancient vision. Much will be still in the proportions of infancy. We are poems in the making, logos at work."[7] When we speak of new age we often focus on the most commercial and superficial facets connected to it. We may think of this time as a time of self-indulgent culture, of drug use, rock and roll, and sexual freedom. There is, of course, some truth to this historically, but this is not all.
The points listed on the wall, describing her significance, do not capture this greater position she takes. Yes, she knew the most famous artists in America, and was friends with them, she was moving around in those circles in New York City, one of the most creative teachers of her generation, and an articulate defender of anarchic community colleges, such as Black Mountain College. But she was actually communicating something that will take lifetimes to fulfill itself. That's why seeing her work in this context, we can feel how this vision, a holistic vision, that can bring together our experiences of more subtle and tangible, and spiritual parts of life, and our practical life, is still sorely needed in the United States.
I'd like to make another digression to the course that we were working on in the last couple of weeks. After we learned still life drawing, we went out and we drew the most fantastic things, the waterfalls, and the woods. High Falls is at the center of this little village where we have our program. Then, after a few days there, enraptured by this place, we went to the old factories. It just didn't capture us as much to go draw these abandoned factories. The capitalist mansions were beautiful, and we drew them too. Then we drew the old workers’ houses, and a feudal structure. It is right where 23 and 217 meet, for those of you who are familiar with the area, from 1665. This is a time when the area was more alike to Czarist Russia, where serfdom was in full force, than any other place. That's what it was like here. The Rensselaer families owned a thousand square miles and “tenants” were treated as lesser people by these aristocrats, something you can learn about in Henry Christman’s, Tin Horns and Calico. Then we went and we drew our gas station, and our Family Dollar. That was hard, partly just because there were so many cars moving in and out at the time.
We put all our drawings up and we're sitting out there, we're trying to look also in the two-dimensional spaces to get a feeling for what's going on here. What's alive here? What's moving here? Maybe a little bit is happening, and we're getting the hang of it, or at least seeing where we can develop it. We sit in front of these drawings, and we sing songs, and we hear the history of the place, we hear about the spirit that formed the landscape that made it into Factory Hill.
We hear about Henry Ford, who was this thinker who saw the whole world as a technical problem related to material production, who makes the first assembly line. He times workers on the assembly line, measures how many inches they have to walk, he doesn't want to waste one step in his desire to create material prosperity. Everything is pursued in the scientific spirit of rationality.
We then learned a protestant hymn in four parts, Idumea. This hymn is about death and all the longing associated with reaching heaven. When you sing it, and you sing the lyrics, you feel all this longing, longing for a spiritual world that is beyond death. You can live this life, walking through the valley of death, and if you lived well, when judgment day comes, hopefully, you will be one of the chosen to be resurrected. This was what animated so many people. We drew all the churches of Philmont and sang these songs in front of our drawings.
We talked about pre-reformation, early Europe, how there was actually a radically different contemplative culture. How experience was so different at that time. They traveled directly into the spiritual world through contemplation, through imagination, through dialectic, through prayer. It's fascinating but it's hard to grasp in its true weight. For instance, if you wanted to live with one notion for a long time to develop this feeling, consider a comment by C.S. Lewis, the medieval scholar, from his book The Discarded Image.
He notes that Dante, who wrote the Divine Comedy, was not known as the author of the Divine Comedy. He was known as the man who had been to hell. This can reveal the seriousness of the paradigm shift of the Galilean revolution. You have to live into that. For them, the cosmos was made of spirit, and you could travel in it with your spirit, which was related to the spirit of the cosmos. The view of the independently self-regulated material cosmos, that we are closed out of, is absolutely novel in this regard. Today’s religious experience is so deeply different than premodern experience. M.C. Richards writes in this direction:
"The ordinary so-called science and so-called religion of our day, in the civilization of the West, tend to conduct a cold war of their own. They attempt to coexist and to divide the world between them."[8]
I'd like to briefly speak about her conception of creativity and liberty and love, because if you haven't noticed, she had an appetite for the peculiar, particular, the strange, and what it could become in you if you had enough energy, if you had enough passion to stay with it until it came alive, and you could join with it, not unlike Cezanne in the field. She experienced this as a path towards a kind of freedom, that is somehow connected to love. She characterizes it in multiple places. This is also something she worked with like Steiner, who also has a conception of freedom connected to love. "Everyone talks about love," Mary Caroline Richards writes, "and I talk about it as much as anyone. I think love is fostered by a capacity to experience the cosmos. We educate ourselves and others to enjoy the suchness of things, the special flavor of each particular instant of being: induplicable, numinous. When we have this capacity strong within us, then will be time enough to talk about love."[9]
There's a great mystery here that we could speak about from many angles, and for a long time, but to reach beyond the surface of things, so that there's something that you connect with, that is your life, but also the life of things. You are exhilarated to be able to be connected on that level, and the way she characterizes it is that exhilaration is a connection to being. This is not an an-aesthetic self-flatulating path, to want to serve things, want to do something good, want to be creative. This is a love fostered by a capacity to experience cosmos.
There's a saying by Hannah Arendt, the political theorist, who said, "We will have to decide whether or not we love the world enough to take responsibility for it." Well, this is obviously more than a decision, but a whole way of living of a people. And in this regard we find much to be wished for today.
When you walk into a room like this, and have all these paintings, and as an artist, I'm just saying, a lot of people come up to me and they're like, "Oh, that's so nice you have time to do your art. It's so nice you can do your art." This is a true obstacle in understanding Richard’s view of art. It arises out of the vision of the value of an object made by the special person we started the evening with, made by someone who has certain skills, some idiosyncratic soul.
Mary Caroline Richards' conception, and the orientation for this art, is that it is literally a threshold into cosmic spiritual life, and not only that, it's something that builds a kind of solidarity, that you feel so connected that you might do some crazy things for the world. You very well might do some crazy things for the world, if you love it. If it's more than just a bunch of calculable material that you can manipulate toward your ends.
We began talking about Banksy and how art is trying to get outside of itself as an object, Banksy is using everyone as part of his artwork, when he shreds the picture in the auction house. The whole event is the artwork. He doesn't want to be captured by the capitalist fetishization of the commodified artwork. Mary Caroline is also involved in this, with so many artists in the last 100 years. She tried to have a more authentic connection to art, and she tries to get beyond the artwork too.
In essence, in trying to follow her, I think we can see her art is a training in being able to connect with the peculiar, specific life of the cosmos, and that this actually engenders love, and acting out of love is freedom. So, she saw in art one of the great ideals of love, education. Her career points to variations on this. At Black Mountain College, art was at the center of the curriculum, where she taught. She taught her whole career, also in the Waldorf movement, which she called the closest she ever came to seeing the centering impulse at work in schools.
So, at the end of our last day of the first block in our program this year, we sat down, we saw our drawings, we sang songs, and we were trying to develop something called a transdisciplinary course. It's not interdisciplinary, and it's not disciplinary, focused on particular disciplines, it's something where you can still stay whole, where you can work with centering, where you're bringing in music, and history, and the landscape, and one another, talking about one another's experiences. You can experience something with the life of the place, and you can do it through drawing and singing, and also discussion and study of texts. As soon as we finished the first course I thought, "I have to do that again better." Because I feel like there's such potential in it, and we are at such a beginning in this work. The spirit in this book, trying to stay whole, trying to bring the straggling part of yourself into the middle again, and the mundane, and the crushed automobiles, and the choreography making breakfast is connected to this impulse. It involves getting beyond the artwork as an object while working artistically with substance and objects.
I so much appreciate your coming out tonight, and I hope that the spirit of Mary Caroline Richards was present.
[1] Richards, Mary C. Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person. Wesleyan University Press, 1962.
[2] Ibid., 140.
[3] Ibid., 144.
[4] Ibid., 42-43.
[5] Ibid., 106.
[6] Ibid., 51.
[7] Ibid., 61.
[8] Ibid., 60.
[9] Ibid., 107.